Transitioning from Legacy Apps to a SaaS Platform 

We have continued to invest in our operational and patient flow technology over the last 33 years, most recently culminating in the launch of two new solutions, Workflow IQ® and Capacity IQ®, which marked the complete SaaS transformation of our platform. The two solutions, built natively in the cloud, represent the forward approach to procedural workflow and bed management respectively, and when coupled with existing SaaS solutions, complete the transformation of our Operations IQ® Platform. But the question is why and why now? 

Historically, hospitals have predominantly used hard-wired server-based IT system architectures, making it challenging to grow and scale to the needs of multiple facilities or functional areas within a hospital. However, as we’ve seen the evolution from independent, individual hospitals to enterprise health systems, and now true market ecosystems, these same hospitals need solutions that extend beyond their four walls and are interoperable with owned, affiliated and even unaffiliated partners. Doing this with a traditional on-premise solution becomes increasingly challenging, if not impossible. Technology and cost concerns limit what an enterprise health system can do. 

Moving to a completely SaaS-based platform helps us solve this issue. We’ve created the Operations IQ® Platform using a microservices-based, event-driven architecture that enables a range of operational capabilities including transfer centers, clinical workflow, preadmissions, transport, temporary employee, asset, bed and patient tracking, patient portals, referral management on a single platform, with a singular perspective and single source of truth. With this architecture, teams across a hospital or health system have the flexibility to “turn on” or “turn off” any capability such as bed management or transfer status, as needed or as licensed. The platform also offers complementary operational and patient flow capabilities that remediate highly complex care access, transition and delivery deficiencies so clinical workflows can proceed in the most efficient and effective manner for patients. 

Further, we engineered the platform for maximum extension of new capabilities, applications and APIs with no need to change the design of the platform, so it aligns with the health system’s future growth requirements. We created each of the Platform’s operational “services” in a self-contained, individually deployable piece of software. As part of our platform, we designed a microservices-based UI framework (TeleTracking’s Micro UI Framework) in which we reuse functional UI components across all end user capabilities creating a consistent user experience, easing the onboarding process and learning of new capabilities. So, unlike on-premise solutions, the platform’s microservices-based, event-driven architecture allows for a flexible configuration in advance before we enable the platform and any of its capabilities. 

We designed the platform with a deep, multi-level security architecture specific to healthcare data handling requirements. We developed our platform around a “zero-day vulnerability” approach to significantly lower health system data breach attempts and data loss risks and threats. We also introduce a dynamic, integrated end user support that is integrated into all operational capabilities. The technology supporting the online customer support system enables the system to grow “smarter” and more intuitive by building an ever-increasing knowledge of client troubleshooting issues and resolutions. 

Introducing the SaaS platform is just the first step as we continue to reimagine how we better manage operations in healthcare.